Health Design Challenge

Today, when you print a medical record, it looks like a cash register receipt. The information is all there, but it is not especially patient-friendly. And if you have a complex health condition, the record can quickly become unwieldy. It’s better than carrying around paper records, for sure, but as patients and consumers, we really need a better user experience - all in an effort to help patients and their family members better manage their health care.

Graphic designers have the unique ability to take something that exists, transform it, and make it more valuable and usable. By making a patient health record more usable, designers can help to prevent medical errors, empower patients to make smart health decisions, and even save lives.

The Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) are inviting graphic designers to rethink how a medical record is presented visually, making it more readable, downloadable, and easy for patients to use. So we are launching a collaborative effort to encourage designers across the country to improve the state of health care.

This is an opportunity for talented individuals to touch the lives of Americans across the country through design. The most innovative designs will be showcased in an online gallery and in a physical exhibit at the Annual ONC Meeting in Washington DC.

A panel of curators will select a final design (that may combine elements of numerous winning designs) that will be built and open-sourced on the code sharing community Github. Because of the collaborative and open source nature of this effort, all entries are required to be submitted under a Creative Commons license. This license allows the community to use and adapt the designs while ensuring that the designer receives attribution.

This challenge requires only that the design of the medical record to be submitted. It is not the responsibility of the entrant to build or code a working version of the design. However, the design must be ultimately implementable using HTML, CSS, and javascript.